Monday, August 13, 2012

Camo chair

Last week, my parents came to visit, and we took the opportunity to do some home tasks. One that had been longstanding was a new chair for my son, Liam. He's been dealing with a chair with broken arms for a while. Meanwhile, his older chair, while ratty, was still in good shape. I still had some leftover cushion from when we did the kitchen chairs, so Mom and I used it to make a new chair.

We went through my fabric box and found some of Rob's old BDUs--the forest green pattern military uniforms.

It's pretty simple concept:

1. First take the chair apart
2. Cut the foam to cover the seat and the arms.
3. Cut the fabric to cover the seat, arms and back
4. Staple the fabric tightly to the seat
5. Put the chair back together.

The seat turned out to be easy. The back, however, was a challenge. It was just a little too large to slide the shirt over once we cut the sleeves and sewed it back up. We finally had to remove the buttons and undo the stitching for the reinforcement on the flap. We cut off the collar to make a flat top. Thus, we were able to make a tube that fit over the back, with the front of the BDU shirt (with the pockets and the patches) on the back. Then we sewed the top in a squarish pattern to fit the chair.

I got a little creative when it came to the arms. Liam is always has stuff sitting on his desk, from pencils to candy to sodas, so I wanted him to have a place for some of it. On one side, we simply cut a pocket out of another of Rob's old shirts, finished the edges and stapled it to the underside of the arm when we did the covering.

The other side has a cup holder. I took one of the arms we cut, and used some other spare fabric to make a round bottom. We took a plastic bottle (from those Clorox wipes, and cut it in half. That made the holder. Then I cut out part of the sleeve so that I had a flap for the sleeve to hold the cup. Then I stapled the flap as I did with the other side.

In all, the project took about 4 hours, partly because the screws were stuck, and the back was difficult, but Liam is thrilled with his "new" BDU chair.